Reading in the Dark

by Seamus Deane

  ‘Paradise was not far away when I died,’ she said one day – a Tuesday in February – into clear air, when my father was washing the dishes, and Deirdre and I were drying and putting them away. It made me smile, that remark. The blue willow-pattern plate I was holding was light and burnished as I stacked it on the shelf. I knew for the first time, in a real way, that she had been in love. Her voice was clear and young; sure enough, when I stepped into the kitchen from the scullery to look at her, she was smiling to herself. I looked towards my father, but he was staring into the sudsy water, his thick arms plunged in and still. Deirdre batted her eyelids at me, signalling her own amusement. Then, some weeks later, one Friday in April, when Mother was folding sheets at the ironing-board, she said in the same voice, ‘Not far. I could see the rim of it.’ This was her new conversation. Connected remarks separated by days, weeks, months, but always in her new voice. I knew she was getting stranger; she was telling herself a story that only appeared now and again in her speech.

  She talked mostly to the younger children, Gerard, Eamon, Deirdre. Sometimes she would hold Gerard’s little round flaxen head close to her breast and bend down to say things in her new voice into his shy face, things that enthralled and mystified me. ‘To go halfway round the globe and never speak again. The poor coward. The lonely soul.’ I listened, envying him. I had the impression she was talking to him and to the others in little confidential bursts, but was leaving my father, Eilis, Liam and me out of it. Once, when I had taken the back off the wireless and was trying to get it to work again, she leaned over and clicked her fingernail against one of the valves. It gave a hoarse ping and lit briefly before fading. A remark hung in the air between us, expanding in a bubble of light, but she said nothing. I left the wireless’s entrails scattered on the table and took a rubber ball from the drawer. Since my arm fracture, I had been told to rebuild the wasted muscles by squeezing this ball, in, out, in, out, as often as possible. I stood there squeezing it and looking at her until my forearm was tired. She talked about this and that, evasively. How cruel she was! I longed for her to talk in her new voice to me, and she felt my longing and she resisted it. I went upstairs and sat on the bed in the cold bedroom and looked at the picture of the Sacred Heart and thought I understood how Jesus felt, him with his breast open and the pierced blood-dripping muscle emblazoned there. I still had the ball in my hand. I lobbed it against the glass of the picture, scoring a bull’s-eye on the heart, and caught it on the first bounce. Her voice came up to me, young and clear in its inflection, but I didn’t catch the words. I lay on the bed and wept. She had been in love with someone else, not quite my father. That’s what she was telling, and not telling, him. And she was telling me. Most of all, she was telling herself A great lamentation of seagulls filled the air as a storm came up from the harbour and the room seemed to lift into the sky with their rising shadows.

  One day, it must have been the following winter, she went to the shelf where the round white boxes of pills were kept, and brought them in the lap of her apron over to me. She asked me to open the boxes and empty them out on to a saucer. I did. Then, she asked me to throw them into the fire. I did that too. They lay there in coloured specks, darkening into nothing. Then she brought out five medicine bottles, red, blue, yellow, two of them clear. She took a jug from the press and emptied them all in, one on top of the other. She asked me to smell it. I bent over and inhaled.

  ‘Slime,’ she said, nodding at me. ‘Chemical slime. Putrid. It makes me sick. Sick even to think I ever took it. Look what it did to my teeth.’ She showed me how her teeth had rotted. Then she went out to the scullery and poured it all down the sink. She came in and smiled at me, but her white smile was ruined now, had been for some time, and her breath was bad.

  ‘I’m better now, son. But I’ll never be as I was. You poor child. My poor family.’

  She hugged my head to her breast. She still smelt of medicine and I could feel her older, as though her breath were shallower than it had once been. I held her for a moment, ashamed of the shame I had been feeling. But I never felt less like asking anything. That night, for the first time in weeks, she made dinner and even talked about Hallowe’en and Christmas. By All Souls’ Night, she had false teeth, and her smile was white again. But when I saw her smile, then and ever afterwards, I could hear her voice, creased with sorrow, saying, ‘Burning, burning,’ and I would look for the other voice, young and clear, lying in its crypt behind it. But it slept there and remained sleeping, behind her false white smile.

  Her startling illness aged them both. My father’s physical strength was still immense, but I sensed that he now began to feel it useless. Sometimes, when he came up the back lane from work, two or three of us would be standing on the backyard wall. As he came alongside, we would jump towards him. He would catch us one by one and swing us on to his shoulders, duck through the gate and then plant us back on the wall as though we weighed nothing. But once, after my mother’s illness was over, when we jumped, he caught us – Eilis first, then Deirdre, then Gerard, then Eamon – but before Liam or I could jump, he let them slither gently down to the ground and waved us off.

  ‘Not tonight, children. You’re too many for me.’

  I watched him go up the yard, leaving a trail of children behind him, and held tight to the clothes-line post as I teetered on the rounded wall-top. Liam was standing on his hands on the wall beside me, trying to keep his legs straight.

  ‘He’s far shook, that man, far shook,’ he said upside-down. I remember thinking how strange his mouth was when he spoke in that position. Then he somersaulted off into the lane, landing on his feet. ‘As you’d expect,’ he added.

  I nodded, but I hadn’t expected it at all, not this fast, at least not until he said it. I slid off the wall carefully, as though from a great height, and felt grateful for the solidity of the black loam of the lane under my boots. But even that solidity weakened as I moved to the gate and saw, through the kitchen window, her smiling her false teeth at him as they talked.

  THE FACTS OF LIFE

  September 1953

  The school’s Spiritual Director wanted to see me. My name was called out in class. I was summoned to go to Father Nugent’s room. Everyone smiled knowingly. This was the facts-of-life talk we were all individually given. The near-albino, Nigger Crossan, squeezed the inside of my thigh as I edged out of the desk past him. He had told us things that made the head swim. Father Nugent had never called him in. This was taken to be a compliment to Nigger’s superior knowledge, or an insult to his irredeemable depravity.

  Although it was a warm day, Nugent had a fire blazing and an armchair drawn close up on either side. He was a small man with grizzled hair, rimless spectacles and a shiny innocent face. He rarely raised his voice, rarely lost his temper and had never been known to strike anyone. He asked if minded if he smoked. I shook my head. He cast around looking for matches, then said it was bad for him anyway.

  ‘You could light it from the fire, Father,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, you’re right, you’re right there. Very good.’

  He lit the cigarette with a spill of paper, dropped himself into the armchair opposite me and nodded at me through the blue spiral of smoke. Then he switched on the lamp on the table beside him, even though it was a bright day. I was toasting on the side nearest the fire, so I moved the chair back as unobtrusively as I could by levering my heels gently against the thin carpet. The carpet rucked behind the chair. I was stuck. As he stared into the fire, brooding in a kindhearted and embarrassed manner before the red coals, I rehearsed the sequence that others had told me to expect. First, the life-is-a-mystery bit. Then, the incarnation – spirit becoming flesh. Reference to Jesus. To His Mother. None to Joseph. Then to Our Own Parents, Adam and Eve. Then to the Fall. Then to our own parents at home. Then to it, the act itself.

  He did as I had been told he would. You were born, he told me – after the early parts were over – of your parents. This I knew, but didn’t think i
t mannerly to say so in any raucous fashion. As a result, he continued, of the act of sexual intercourse between your parents. I knew this too, but here my curiosity did light up, for I didn’t know, although I had heard much, what this was. What I had heard was certainly improbable. It sounded like a feat of precision engineering, one I could never quite associate with what the Church called lust, which seemed wild, fierce, devil-may-care, like eating and drinking together while dancing to music on top of the table. I knew, but did not know. I wanted to know, but did not want to find out that I already knew I wanted to know something different, a subtler way of being with a woman, as he called it, although I disliked the vagueness of that. Most of all, I wanted to believe it was different for my parents and for that whole generation before us; so that this sexual intercourse, if it were true, would be for us only, our generation’s problem, and there’d be no embarrassment involved in looking at them afterwards.

  ‘… came together in love,’ he was saying. I nodded appreciatively, although so far, I realised with panic, I had heard almost nothing. I decided to attend, but he chose that moment to stir the fire with a long-handled poker and we both watched the coals heave up their red sides and sparkle. I thought of the girl I fancied, Irene Mackey. I could come together with her all right if I could only get up the nerve to speak to her. Father Nugent was talking about passion. Love breeds passion. In passion, the body alters. The penis … Had I heard that word before? Did I know it? I knew it, but I’d never heard it. I nodded vigorously. Penis? So that’s what they called it.

  ‘Yes.’

  A moment later, he said ‘vagina’ and was asking me if I knew that word, and what it was. I knew what it must be but I couldn’t envisage it and when he asked me if I knew where it was, I gave a slightly hysterical smile and said yes, yes, I did, but I was telling myself, no, you don’t, not really, ask him, you stupid shit, ask him, that’s what you’re here for, but I couldn’t do anything except stare at him and feel my head nodding every so often although I didn’t know at what, for all I could see were his lips moving back and forth, up and down, and his teeth appearing and disappearing and the firelight glinting in his glasses at times so that his eyes seemed balefully red, and his black soutane gave him the appearance of a strange animal with burning eyes that was leaning forward, purring, to spring.

  ‘When the enlarged penis enters the vagina, seed is emitted.’

  Emitted? Holy Christ, emitted? He-mit-it? He-mid-it? What word was that? I forced my voice out.

  ‘He what?’

  Father Nugent paused, eyebrows raised. ‘He…?’

  Then he caught on.

  ‘Oh, emitted. From the Latin, emittere, to send out. The seed is sent out.’

  This puzzled me. It seemed a very distant procedure.

  ‘You mean he sends it to her?’ In what? I wanted to ask. An envelope? In a wee parcel? What, in the name of Christ, was this nutcase talking about?

  ‘In a sense. The more technical word is “ejaculated”.’

  Oh, from the Latin, I knew he would say, as he did. Thank you, father. Now he’s throwing it out, like a spear. And semen is the Latin for seed. Do you have to know Latin to do this? Does He say to Her, ‘Here you are. This is from the Latin for throw or send’? If there’s no Latin involved, that’s what makes it a sin. Love is in Latin, lust isn’t. I thought of all the words in English I had heard. They surely sounded a lot more savage.

  ‘Do you understand now?’ He was looking so sweetly at me that I hadn’t the heart to say no, I was so totally confused and I didn’t know what the famous act was or how on earth my parents could have performed it without a good grounding in Latin roots. Maybe the sacrament of marriage gave you that knowledge, spontaneously, then you could do it the way the Church recommended. I brightened at that thought and he mistook my expression for illumination.

  ‘You see, now?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  The seed grew into a child in the womb. Womb I knew from the Hail Mary, in Latin and in English. And in Irish. This was all pretty legit. I felt singed all down one side, and there was sweat gathering behind my right knee. He was looking at me questioningly. He must have asked me something. I changed my expression to try to look quizzical, raising my eyebrows and widening my eyes.

  ‘Do you?’

  Bereaved Christ’s mother, do I what? What do I do? Should I pretend to faint from the heat? Would someone not knock at the door? In total gratitude, I heard him go on before I could get my tongue off the roof of my mouth.

  ‘Most boys don’t think of it at this age.’

  You’re wrong there, I shouted inside. A lot of them think of nothing else. But you’re right about me. I’m normal.

  ‘It’s only later they ask themselves how an old celibate like me can know these things.’

  That set me aslant. I thought he was talking about sex. Who cared if he was celibate? Celibacy was just a funny smell of soap and power. So, he went on, when I did come to think about this later – although I wanted to tell him nothing was less likely – but when I did, I would appreciate that there was a way of dedicating your life to a person, and a way of dedicating your life to God and that they were very similar for they were both founded on a love that was unconditional. He paused. I had heard that word before, on the day Liam and I had made our Confirmation. With Confirmation, the dread was being picked out of the crowd for questioning, sitting there in the church, rows of us, while the Bishop walked up the aisle escorted by two priests and an altar boy walking behind him, holding the hem of his robe. Every so often he would stop on his way to the altar, look across a row and point to someone. That boy would then be ushered out and had to stand waiting at the end of the row with one of the teachers until the Bishop reached the altar, sat down on his throne, spread his vestments wide and beckoned for the boys to be brought up. We all slumped down as tight as we could and stared at the floor. He stopped at the end of our row. I sensed him scanning us and sensed his fat little finger pointing. ‘It’s you,’ whispered Liam, ‘he’s pointing at you.’ I saw the finger pointing and the teacher starting to work his way along the row. He placed his hand on my shoulder. Not me, Sir. It’s Campbell he was pointing at.’ Busty Campbell, beside me, dug his elbow into my ribs. ‘No, sonny,’ said the teacher, ‘it’s you. Don’t be nervous. It’ll be all right.’

  Five of us were led up to the altar. We would be confirmed first, as soldiers of Christ, as members of the Church Militant on earth. He would touch our cheeks to symbolise the blows we would receive in defence of our faith and then he would confirm us by making the sign of the cross on our brows. But first, this random selection was to make sure the class had been taught the doctrines of the Church properly. Each knelt in front of the Bishop, he leaned over and asked questions, the pupil answered, was confirmed and led away to the side chapel where he would wait, in full view of the adults assembled along the side pews, to rejoin his row as it came up and returned. I was the last of the five.

  The altar was sweet with incense. The gold-embroidered robe of the Bishop and his golden staff, held upright in his right hand, shone on me. I had the sensation that if he touched me I too would turn to gold, my face metalled and my legs heavy, my body precious and dead. The Bishop smiled at me.

  ‘Tell me, my child, what is the central mystery of our faith?’

  ‘The Incarnation of Christ, Your Lordship.’

  That was easy. We had recited that endlessly in class.

  ‘What does Incarnation mean? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘The taking on of human flesh. God becoming Man.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  Father Browne, with his grey bushy hair, was nodding encouragement from behind the throne. The Bishop’s plump hand moved towards me. I wanted to giggle, feeling my stomach move at the thought of his touch, at the thought it was all over. My face twitched and his hand stopped.

  ‘One last question. What is the nature of God’s love for mankind?’

  I looked at his
robe. No word came to me. My stomach started to grow a cold spot in its centre. He gazed at me. Father Browne had stopped nodding. Father Mullan, on the other side of the throne, was frowning at me. The crowded cathedral behind me was almost perfectly silent, although someone coughed. Heat from the congregation reached me and passed through me, leaving me wet. I thought of crying, but then thought I should answer the question somehow. Then I realised I had forgotten it. What had he asked? It came back to me.

  ‘Unconditional,’ I whispered.

  Everyone smiled. The Bishop struck my cheek a light blow, rubbed his thumb on my brow, muttered in Latin.

  I knelt on. Father Browne signalled with his hand that I was to get up. I knelt there, ensnared.

  ‘Unconditional,’ I said again.